The two most difficult challenges when running your own business are keeping the books and managing contacts. But when done correctly, they lead to success.

For my part, I’ve grown quite attached to two Intuit products that help me handle both with ease – QuickBooks Customer Manager and QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition .

The applications integrate well, allowing you to input customer information, including mail addresses and e-mail addresses, into one and call it up in the other – especially handy for invoicing and other customer interaction.

Customer Manager is a great tool for anyone who juggles a multitude of projects. It lets you keep notes of phone calls, meetings, URLs related to the project and more, all tied together. And you can tie that information to contact names so when you work with a contact on another project, all that data is at your fingertips.

You can also customize the fields related to projects to fit your business. It’s important for me to track the URLs of my published articles, so I tailored one of the fields accordingly. You can add fields for your pay rate, project due date -- anything that’s relevant for you to keep a record of.

I also use the Customer Manager calendar. It lets me easily bring up project information in relation to appointments. This has been invaluable for conference calls – a major part of my schedule. And I can quickly type notes into the history of the project or associate notes with contact names so I can track when I spoke to someone and the outcome of the call.

If you prefer, you can integrate the Customer Manager calendar with Outlook or even choose Outlook as your main calendar.

Contact management is a breeze, as well. You can create fields that relate to your business that help you categorize your contacts. For me, relating contacts to a technology area or publication genre is important. Customer Manager also lets you merge your lists for mailings or specialized marketing tools.

The only bugaboo I have with the product is the inputting of appointments into the calendar. Sometimes the information doesn’t take on the first try – a problem with the software that I hope Intuit fixes soon.

Otherwise, I’m a big believer. Customer Manager’s been a lifesaver for me in terms of keeping contacts and their context straight.

Next time, I’ll share how QuickBooks Premier Professional Services has been a plus for my business.